Digital dieting
How much screen time is enough, and should we cut down? Katie Kenny reports.
In the back of an Uber stuck in rush-hour traffic, I unlock my iPhone. My thumb moves towards the Twitter app, before pausing and hovering over the blue icon, as though it were a trigger. Why the hesitation? I’m thinking about my screen time report, and the weekly notification it sends me about how long I spend doing what on my devices.
Anyone with an iPhone who’s updated their operating system to iOS 12 will be familiar with this new time-management tool. The screen time dashboard (found via the Settings app) shows daily and weekly screen time figures, broken down by time and apps used.
Your screen report isn’t public. I hardly take any notice of mine. Yet the thought of scoring a ‘‘bad’’ report, well, it kind of stresses me out. So I put my phone away and make inane conversation about the weather for a while. Then I just stare, silently, out the window and into other cars where people are playing on their phones.
New technologies are always surrounded by fear. Since the advent of screens and, in particular, smartphones, we’ve been worried about the harm they cause. Public concern escalated when some Silicon Valley defectors revealed the technology they’d worked on was actually designed to trigger hits of dopamine that keep us coming back for more. Addictive products make more money. We’re living in an attention economy. And so on.
There’s also growing evidence that smartphones and social media can be bad for our mental and physical health. This year, the World Health Organisation added ‘‘internet gaming disorder’’ to its list of psychiatric diagnoses, estimating 9 per cent of gamers are afflicted. (There’s still debate about whether addiction is really the right term for this behaviour.)
But the big technology companies appear to be acknowledging the issue by creating tools such as the screen time report. In January, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg vowed to fix Facebook, making it his ‘‘personal challenge’’ to make sure that time spent on the social network ‘‘is time well spent’’.
Other apps and extensions promise to help users reclaim their time and be more productive by putting limits on certain sites, for example, or the number of tabs open at once. You can even spend hundreds of dollars on a Light Phone, a phone ‘‘designed to be used as little as possible’’. The device is so limited, functionally, that it’s pitched as a ‘‘casual second phone that encourages us to leave our smartphones behind from time to time’’. Yes, it’s a bach phone.
So is all of this just a trendy, minimalist tech movement designed to make us feel bad for using our devices while at the same time conning us into buying yet more devices? Or, just maybe, it’s time we took more notice of our bad (screen time) report cards.
In September this year, Tim Johns, a reporter for The Jeremy Vine Show on BBC Radio 2, addressed the issue on the streets of London armed with a megaphone. For a segment on socalled smartphone zombies, he spoke to a cab driver who said he sees people step onto the road without looking, ‘‘every day’’. Another said that, as a cyclist, his biggest problem wasn’t cars or trucks or buses, but ‘‘pedestrians walking out without realising’’. Johns used the megaphone to shout at people he thought were at risk of stepping in front of traffic: ‘‘Excuse me, sir, mind the kerb, please.’’
Afterwards, Johns tweeted: ‘‘Here is how I spent my morning: using a megaphone to heckle members of the public for having their heads buried in their phones.’’
Other people on Twitter, perhaps smartphone zombies themselves, didn’t like that.
‘‘Hi Tim, I ‘have my head buried in my phone’ when I’m out and about because I suffer from anxiety and chatting to my friends on Twitter helps me to relax when I’m in public, thus making me a functional member of society. You’re a twat,’’ one said.
‘‘ ‘Stop looking at your phone’ is the new ‘Cheer up love’,’’ another said. ‘‘What’s wrong with looking at your phone? I have £500 worth of computer in my pocket containing all my friends & the sum of human knowledge but I’m supposed to prefer what, small talk with random johnnies?’’ That response was retweeted more than 5000 times.
Johns also received a few direct messages, he later tells me. ‘‘No-one emailed me. The programme I work on (with 7 million listeners) didn’t get one complaint.’’
While he didn’t think the pileon was fair, in a way it was understandable, he says. ‘‘Because of the wording of my tweet, without context, [it] looked somewhat sanctimonious. Don’t expect people to click through to further content or context.
‘‘As ever with the BBC, the piece I made wasn’t a judgment on people who do stare at their phones when walking. It merely posed a question about it and was the starting point to a discussion.’’
He also learnt a lesson about Twitter and social media in general. ‘‘Twitter, I think especially, is just not reflective of real life. It’s a spontaneous place full of sudden love or immediate hatred and a great deal of quickly perpetuated ignorance. It’s also an incredible, powerful, enjoyable and important tool. I’ll still enjoy using it but just don’t take it too seriously.’’
Twitter happens to be my most-used app, according to my screen time report. I haven’t stepped in front of traffic while using it, but the same can’t be said for other Kiwis – figures from the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC) show cellphone injuries are on the rise. In 2016-17, ACC received 239 cellphone-related claims, costing $202,181 (in total it received more than 1.9 million claims and paid out more than $3.7 billion). A
decade ago, there were just 94 claims amounting to $37,187.
But the more pervasive health issue is the impact of blue light emitted by screens. A paper released this month by the Royal Society Te Apa¯ rangi found our increasing exposure to artificial blue light is a possible risk for our health, as well as for wildlife and for studying the night sky.
Blue light is a part of the visible electromagnetic spectrum. It peaks at midday, while the orange glow we see at sunrise and sunset is because fewer blue-light wavelengths are reaching us.
In 2002, scientists discovered a type of cell in the human eye that detects blue light. These cells send signals to the part of the brain that is the timekeeper for our internal rhythms, such as when we feel sleepy or hungry, or when different hormones are produced.
When these cells get too much blue light at night, they tell our bodies it’s daytime. Not only can that lead to a disrupted sleep, but flow-on health effects such as increased risk of obesity, depression and potentially some types of cancer.
‘‘Light during the day and darkness at night are some of the environmental conditions we have evolved and lived in for a long time,’’ says associate research professor Mirjam Mu¨ nch, at Massey University’s Sleep/Wake Research Centre. ‘‘The light-dark cycle is still one of the most important external ‘zeitgebers’ (time cues) for our internal timekeeping system.’’
So even if you’re just checking your phone for five minutes before bed, it can still have an impact on sleep and hormonal secretion, she says. Your eyes will be more sensitive, in fact, if you check your devices after avoiding them and other bright lights all evening.
But there are ways to reduce our exposure to blue light, she adds. We can change blue ‘‘cool’’ light bulbs to more yellow ‘‘warm’’ ones inside our homes. We can also use software that reduces bright blue light from screens at night. Some blueblocking goggles cut out shorter wavelengths of light. But the best thing to do, of course, is to stay off digital devices before bed.
If you have children, that can mean physically removing their devices, says Nick Baker, paediatrician at Nelson Marlborough District Health Board. ‘‘We do see a lot of kids with appalling sleep routines, and televisions and other screens in the bedroom.’’
If a good bedtime routine isn’t established early on, it can become a ‘‘battleground’’ between children and their parents. ‘‘My message to the general public is, plan ahead. Don’t go down ways you don’t want to continue, particularly around things like sleep.’’
As well as poor sleep routines, too much screen time at a young age can affect a child’s development in other domains.
More than 80 per cent of New Zealand children aged 5 and 9 spent two or more hours a day looking at a screen, according to the Ministry of Health. For children aged 10 to 14, that rose to about 90 per cent.
‘‘As we shift away from human interactions towards digital interactions – not to say they’re all bad – we need to try to maintain a balance. Some screen time might complement learning, but when it overwhelms other activities such as playing outside or with other humans, then it’s not beneficial.’’
It’s hard to know whether my screen time data is in the realm of normal. Apple doesn’t release that sort of information, and a comparison with colleagues and friends isn’t helpful. A colleague aged 42 spends nearly four hours a day on his iPhone. A designer friend, 29, spends just one hour. A 19-year-old university student: 21⁄2 hours. My average is nearly three hours.
However, I’m pretty good at limiting screen time before bed. Still, I wonder: am I addicted? University of Auckland PhD candidate Delia Cotoros-Goodall is exploring problematic internet use. We’re seeing more cases of people suffering consequences as severe as death because of their use of technology, she says. But we’re still arguing about what constitutes problematic use, and addiction. She aims to come up with a measure, which can then help inform treatment.
‘‘Once we have a measure we just need to keep testing it and keep adjusting it as we move forward. Our entire world revolves around the internet. It’s not easy to say cut down internet use or don’t go online.
‘‘Previous measures were like, if you spend more than 40 hours per week, that’s a threshold you shouldn’t cross. But some people’s jobs are dependent on the internet. If [your internet use] is not affecting your daily life, then is it really a problem? Is it affecting your relationships, your hygiene, your sleep?’’
I don’t think so. I mean, so many of my relationships, particularly with friends and family in other cities and countries, are enabled, rather than hindered, by the internet. Perhaps my time in the back of an Uber would be better spent catching up with them, rather than staring out the
window.